Government healthcare website

I haven't posted here in a while because I have been preparing a post about what has been going on with the government healthcare website. As you should already know, it has been a disaster. People unable to get to the site, unable to log on, unable to create an account. I have seen video after video after video of people explaining what went wrong, and read all manner of article trying to make sense of it all. I couldn't write a succinct, clear post explaining it all.

It makes my head hurt. I'm going to try to let you know some of the underlying problems that are happening and clear up some of the confusion without turning this into a dissertation.

There are several issues contributing to the difficulties the site is having: Bad design, lack of testing, mandate of conversion to name a few.

Regarding bad design, it turns out the site is designed so poorly that it is sending far more data (unsecured, no less!) back and forth among participants - including insurance companies,  the site itself, and the users - than is necessary. For example, let's say the web page comes up and you are asked to enter your name and address. When you hit submit, it should only send that info, as well as some security and validation info as well. But it is sending much, much more. In fact, the belief now is that it is so poorly designed that major parts of it will need to be redesigned from scratch. That's right - not redeveloped or improved, but scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up.

Next is lack of testing. When I teach systems analysis and design, which is essentially the subject of how to develop and implement large systems, students learn about three types of tests: Desk testing, unit testing, and string testing. In desk testing, the functionality and logic of the system is tested on paper. It's an easy and inexpensive way to root out big problems and fix them efficiently. With unit testing, each function is tested individually. In other words, the ability of the system to accept user-submitted info would be tested as a standalone function, as would the ability to calculate a total or compute sales tax. With string testing, all those functions are tested together to be sure data is being passed between those functions properly. It might be discovered that while sales tax is being correctly calculated it is not being added to the total at checkout.

The point of all of this is it appears that the only type of testing that was done is unit testing. No desk or string testing at all. And for a system so dependent on so many participants and aspects, this is unforgivable.

There was also no capacity or load testing, meaning testing the system to be sure it can handle the expected traffic. Although it was assumed that millions would try to log on, it was only tested with 200 simultaneous users.

Finally, conversion. The government is notorious for forcing systems on line when they are nowhere near ready, and it has happened again. The site had to go live on a specific date whether it was ready or not, and it was not ready. This is one of the cardinal rules that should not be violated, but, especially with federal systems, it often is.

One other thing: This is not a commentary on the plan itself as many people try to make it out to be. It was hard to find links for this post because so many were biased one way or the other, using the site's failures to attack or defend the plan itself, but that's irrelevant, a red herring, don't fall into that trap. The failures of the system are unrelated to that regardless of your feelings of the plan itself. But the site is a huge disaster, and apparently none of the designers have ever been in my class (or maybe they have) because these mistakes are design 101 errors. Hopefully they get it figured out soon, but I suspect it will take at least three months to get to operating speed. We'll see.

New top-level domains

You are all already familiar with the concept of a top-level domain, or TLD. It's the extension at the end of a web address, such as .com, .net, .org or .biz, to name a few. Now, ICANN, the organization that oversees these domains and allows or disallows new ones, has for the first time approved and will roll out TLDs in other languages. I can't write them out since they are in languages such as Arabic, Russian, and Chinese, so I will instead point you to this article at the BBC which does a very good job of explaining it.

Other large companies also applied for new TLDs, both Amazon and Google want .music of course, but Google also applied for the mysterious and enigmatic .boo. I'm intrigued...

Now, you may wonder why ICANN has the authority to do this, who made them boss? That's a valid question, and I will fill you in when we talk about in class!

For those who torrent, a sad day.

For anyone who runs torrents, today is a sad day. If you don't know what they are or if you're a media producer, it's a victory. Isohunt.com has been shut down.

A little background: Those who remember the glory days of pioneering peer-to-peer file-sharing client Napster will be familiar with the point of torrents. Napster didn't have central servers, it allowed you to connect to the machines of other individual users to download files, usually illegally, including music, movies, and software. Of course, with no central controls, it was also a haven for viruses and other malware that would do terrible damage to someone's machine. It was a risky activity.

Napster

Nowadays, we have torrents. I don't condone it, but I understand it. The way it works is as follows: You want to download a movie or television show, say. You would locate the appropriate torrent online (it actually has the .torrent extension), download it, and then click on it, which would open your chosen torrent client software, and the tv show/movie/whatever would download. It would then be added as a 'seed,' meaning others could connect to you to download the same file.

Similar to Napster, you are connecting to multiple other users to download the file with no central server which makes the transfer very difficult to track. In fact, ISPs (COX or Comcast or whoever) try to identify those running torrents by the amount of data transmitting over their connection.

Isohunt screen

Isohunt was the main site for locating these torrents, along with a comment section and listing of uploaders and downloaders to help verify the integrity of the file. However, because it was obviously a pirating site, it has agreed to shut down and pay a $10 million fine, although they have no way of paying. The creator of the site tried to argue that it simply listed he torrents without supplying them, as users connected to other users and not the site, but that logic was unsuccessful. It's hardly the only torrent site out there, so I suspect others will pick up the slack.

Artificial intelligence!

We have talked a lot about artificial intelligence, about what it is and what constitutes an organism's ability to think. We discussed sentience, which refers to self awareness, and compared machines to spiders, one of which was aware of its existence and the other which isn't.

On top of that, there was a clue on last week's crossword puzzle asking about the father of artificial intelligence, and from class discussion it appeared there was some question as to who that actually was. The correct answer is Alan Turing, a pioneer in not just AI but computing in general, mathematics, and other related fields. For all his contributions he lived a short, tragic life and it wasn't until years after his death that he was issued a formal apology by the British government for the way he was treated.

Now, serendipitously (which isn't a word), there is an article from the BBC titled 'Will Machines Ever Be Able to Think?' It discusses the current state of artificial intelligence, which is right where we left it when we discussed it in class, but it also talks about the history of computing and the people who contributed in significant ways, including Turing, as well as Ada Lovelace who is noted for being a female pioneer in what was and is a male-dominated industry, and Charles Babbage, a friend of Lovelace who created the almost-but-not-quite completed Analytical Engine, a rebuilt version of which can be seen at the Computer History Museum today.

It's a fascinating read and sets a solid groundwork for discussing where we are now in terms of intelligent machines, But we all know where we are in terms of that - right here.

Chili's enters the 21st century

I thought you all might be interested to see something I found at a Chili's restaurant in Baltimore. It seems they are trying to make the experience more...interactive? At each table was a small digital display by a company called Ziosk, and it allowed patrons to peruse the menu, play games, join the frequent eater's club or whatever it's called, you could even pay your bill, dividing up the payment if necessary, and printing a receipt as well!

You still have to have the server take the order and bring it out, but other than that it's pretty automated. I don't know if they have them out here, perhaps one of you can confirm or deny that. Have any of you used one, even somewhere else? I also thought I would show the surreptitious picture I took of the family at the other table. They were all engrossed in the Ziosk and not paying attention to each other. That's the downside to any device such as this, and I thought it was a sad thing to see. They did have the infant playing with a calculator, though, so on the bright side we may have a future mathematician in our midst.

Mandalay Bay has TV screens in the weirdest places.

On the sinks in the public bathrooms, for example. They ought to put them above the...you know.

Firefox and the ultimate memory leak

You may remember our discussion of RAM (Random Access Memory) in class. We discussed how any programming that is running, whether you are using it or not, takes up space in RAM. And the more programs you open, the more space gets taken up. Eventually, as RAM fills to capacity and the machine has to start using hard drive space to store program data your PC will start so stutter and slow, possibly even crash. Of course, if you close some programs - [Control]-[Shift]-[Escape] all held down at once will show all running processes - you will free up the space in memory that they were using and your machine will spring back to life.

However, we also talked about what are known as memory leaks. A misnomer to be certain, because they refer to a program *not* releasing memory once it's shot down, sometimes even continuing to fill it! I also mentioned that the Firefox browser has one of the worst memory leaks I've ever experienced. Well, just to prove the point, Firefox crashed on me over the weekend and when I checked the process list arranged by memory used, look who was right at the top:

Look at that huge number! To make matters worse, not only is it double the memory usage of Internet Explorer, you'll notice the column header shows the word 'Private' in parentheses after 'Memory.' That means 'Private Working Memory' and that is memory that is not useable, not shareable, by other process. Firefox has hogged it all to itself!

I'd be interested to know who among you actively read and post, so here's the task for all of you. Bring up the process list for your OS (Instructions on how to do that are at the end of this post) and indcate the program that is using the most memory and how much it is using, and the program that is using the *second* highest amount of memory, and how much it is using. Put your results in the comments, an we'll see if there are any memory hogs among your programs!

How to determine memory usage of programs:

WINDOWS:
Hold down the Control, Shift, and Escape key all at once to bring up process explorer. Clicking on the 'Memory' column heading will arrange programs by memory usage.

MAC (From Apple's own site):
For Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4 or later, open Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities/).

For Mac OS X 10.2.8 or earlier, open ProcessViewer (/Applications/Utilities/). Mac OS X processes and applications are listed in main window.

In Mac OS X 10.3.9 and earlier, the "% Memory" column indicates the percentage of RAM in use by an application or process at the time of sampling.

In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you can see the overall percentages of memory in use or idle at the bottom of the Activity Monitor window.

Bill Gates out at Microsoft?

Actually, he's not officially with Microsoft anymore after stepping down as CEO in 2008, even making the surprisingly entertaining video below (I purposely chose this version with the less-than-stellar audio so you could hear the audience reaction).

Even so, he is still the chairman and on the board of directors, but some of the top shareholders are asking, now that Microsoft co-founder and current CEO Steve Ballmer has announced his own retirement, that Bill Gates step down fully as well. They feel that Microsoft is too far behind its competitors in the expanding mobile space, and with Bill Gates and Ballmer in the position to essentially voir dire any potential successor that my want to head Microsoft down a different path, they need to be out completely.

I suspect this won't happen, and I'm torn on the issue either way. Apple just isn't the same company without Steve Jobs, and I'm a big fan of Microsoft, they gave us standards that allowed computing and technology to expand into the global driving powerhouse it is today, but I also see the need for flexibility in thought and the ability to take risks and expand into new markets. Of course, when they've done that in the past, they didn't have the marketing to back it up. Remember Zune?

Notorious trafficking website shut down

This article from the BBC notes that a notorious site used for the buying and selling of all sorts of contraband including illegal drugs, weapons, and even humans has been shut down. Long known about but very difficult to find, the Silk Road website was only accessible through a private network using what is known as The Onion Router, or the TOR network. The site now has a single page stating the feds have seized it.

It also used the virtual Bitcoin currency in order to keep the transactions anonymous, and apparently the owner was involved in some untoward activities himself.

This is a positive in my opinion, never mind the illegal drugs and guns, but the human trafficking, child pornography and murder-for-hire contracts it was known for has been shut down as well. This is a triumph for those who fight against such things.

UPDATE: There is a much more detailed account of what happened at this link.

Who's surprised? Anyone? No?

Normally when I make one of these posts I'll add some commentary about the story or video I'm linking, but I'm scared to do that in this case. I think it would be better to just let all of you read the article and make your own comments about what it says.

I will provide some foreshadowing regarding what you are about to read. It deals with the different things men and women post on Facebook, as well as common words used by various age groups. It turns out women talk about cliche'd women things, and men talk about cliche'd men things (also, cursing)! We're all what everyone except ourselves thinks we are!

Read the article here, and be shocked and awed. Or not.